Hut Nine, by Nalini Chauhan

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

We came to England in October 1972 with one suitcase each and the clothes we stood up in, and for the first eleven weeks we lived at Hawksworth, an old air force camp in Suffolk. Before we left Kampala my father had owned a wholesale business with eleven lorries; now he queued with everyone else at a trestle table to be given a number, a book of meal tickets and four grey blankets that smelled of mothballs. Our family had half of a long wooden hut, divided from the Mehtas by a curtain on a wire. There was a black stove in the middle that the men took turns to feed with coke through the night, and still my mother wore her cardigan in bed. Volunteer ladies gave out coats from a heap in the old hangar, and I was handed a duffel coat with toggles that I did not know how to fasten. The food in the canteen was boiled and pale until the second week, when the cooks let my mother and two other women into the kitchen to make dal. Every morning a list was pinned outside the office of the families who had been found houses, and every morning my father read it twice before he would believe our name was not there.

List five things you learn about the family’s life at the camp.